Rhesus

Euripides

Euripides. The Rhesus of Euripides. Translated into English rhyming verse with explanatory notes by Gilbert Murray. Murray, Gilbert, translator. London: George Allen and Company, Ltd., 1913.

  1. My king, what cometh? There appears
  2. Some Spirit, like a mist of tears;
  3. And in her arms a man lieth,
  4. So young, so wearied unto death;
  5. To see such vision presageth
  6. Wrath and great weeping.
The Guards hide their heads in their mantles.
MUSE.
  1. Nay, look your fill, ye Trojans. It is I,
  2. The many-sistered Muse, of worship high
  3. In wise men’s hearts, who come to mourn mine own
  4. Most pitifully loved, most injured, son,
  5. For whose shed blood Odysseus yet shall pay
  6. Vengeance, who crawled and stabbed him where he lay.
MUSE.
  1. With a dirge of the Thracian mountains,[*](P. 50,1. 895 ff. and 1. 906 ff., A dirge of the Thracian mountains.]—Such dirges must have struck the Greeks as the fragments of Ossian struck the Lowlanders among us. I have found that the dirge here goes naturally into a sort of Ossianic rhythm.)
  2. I mourn for thee, O my son.
  3. For a mother’s weeping, for a galley’s launching, for
  4. the way to Troy;
  5. A sad going, and watched by spirits of evil.
  6. His mother chid him to stay, but he rose and went.
  7. His father besought him to stay, but he went in anger.
  8. Ah, woe is me for thee, thou dear face,